Climate change may already affect 85 percent of humanity: Report

Climate change could already be affecting 85 percent of the world's population, an analysis of tens of thousands of scientific studies has found. The analysis, released on Monday, was carried out by a team of researchers that used machine learning to comb through vast troves of research published between 1951 and 2018 and found some 100,000 papers that potentially documented evidence of climate change's effects on the Earth's systems. "We have overwhelming evidence that climate change is affecting all continents, all systems," study author Max Callaghan told the AFP news agency in an interview. He added there was a "huge amount of evidence" showing the ways in which these effects are being felt. The researchers taught a computer to identify climate-relevant studies, generating a list of papers on topics from disrupted butterfly migration to heat-related human deaths to forestry cover changes.